Chapter Two Notes from the Influencer Book

For Chapter Two I have just copied the summary verbatim.  I would be interested in any comments that come to your mind as you read this summary.

Erica

 

Chapter Two (Search for Vital Behaviors) Summary (page 43 - 44)

Search for Behaviors:  Take care to ensure that you're searching for strategies that focus on behavior.  Don't let experts pass off outcomes as behaviors.  You already know what you want to achieve:  not you want to learn what to do.  Be leery of vague advice.  If you can't immediately figure out what the expert is telling you to do, then the advice is too abstract and could imply a number of possible behaviors - many of them wrong.

Search for Vital Behaviors:  Master influencers know that a few behaviors can drive big change.  They look carefully for the vital behaviors that create a cascade of change.  No matter the size of the problem, if you dilute your efforts across dozens of behaviors, you'll never reach critical mass.  If your problem is common, odds are the research has already been done for you.

When behaviors must be customized to your personal or local circumstance, look for vital behaviors by studying positive deviance.  Look for people, times, or places where you or others don't experience the same problems and try to determine the unique behaviors that make the difference.

Search for Recovery Behaviors:  People make mistakes, and yet find some way to quickly get back on track rather than sink further into despair.  Henry, for example, learned that failure to follow his dietary plan one day should cue him to look for where he went wrong and then to take corrective action - and not to take the one-time failure as a sign that he won't be able to succeed and that therefore he should give in to his cravings.

Until Henry identified this and similar recovery behaviors, he was constantly taking two steps forward, followed by three steps back.  Now when he runs into a problem, he stops his backward fall by using his mistake as a data point for learning and not as an indicator that he ought to give up.  Recovery behaviors make up an important part of every change master's influence strategy.

Test Your Results:  Finally,  if you've conducted your own research and found candidates for what you think are high-leverage vital behaviors, test your ideas.  Implement the proposed actions and see if they yield the results you want.  Don't merely measure the presence or absence of the vital behaviors; also check to see whether the results you want are happening.

To make it easy to both surface and test vital behaviors, conduct short-cycle-time experiments.  Don't hypothesize forever or put massive studies into place.  Instead, develop the habit of conducting rapid, low-risk mini experiments.

Whether you conduct best-practices studies on your own, search for positive deviance, conduct mini experiments, or simply look for those who have already identified the vital behaviors for you, the point is the same.  Don't glance around, take the first piece of advice from a friend, or rely on a hunch.  Instead, follow the lead of influence geniuses everywhere.  Conduct a genuine search for vital behaviors.  If you don't, it won't be long before you'll be searching for serenity.

Using my Blog to Log my Notes from the All Agency Book Study on the book titled: Influencer: The Power to Change Anything (Introduction)

Notes from the book titled:  Influencer:  The Power to Change Anything by Patterson, Grenny, Maxfield, McMillan, and Switzler

Part One:  The Power to Change Anything, which is addressed in Chapters 1 - 3

My Insights:  I decided to record a set of Shift From and Shift toward statements to capture my thoughts as I read:

Shift From.... Shift Toward

·       Wisdom to know the difference to wisdom to make a difference

·       Lack of skill to effect change to developing the skill set to make change happen

·       Seeking solace to seeking a solution

·       Carping to talking

·       Making threats to offering incentives

·       Saying 'things' need to change around here to identifying exactly what needs to be changed

·       Focusing on random behaviors to using data to identify the vital behaviors (where vital behavior = a handful of high-leverage behaviors)

·       Confusing outcomes as behaviors to understanding that behaviors are the things you do to get the outcomes you want.

·       Punishing negative behaviors to rewarding positive behaviors

·       Long lectures, which allow learners to struggle and repeat mistakes to rapidly altering between teaching and questioning (testing) to make immediate corrections.

·       Focusing on change behaviors to focusing on changing mindsets first then suggesting behavior changes that will work (address the two vital questions "Will it be worth it?" and "Can I do it?"

·       Telling and lecturing to a set of steps that progress from vicarious to direct experiences

·       Telling irrelevant, data laden stories to telling a good story where good story  = telling the whole story + clearly linking current behaviors to existing negative results + positive replacements + dealing with the two vital questions Will it be worth it?" and "Can I do it?"

·       Persuading others to helping people experience the world as I experience it

·       Telling my stories to telling the stories of students and teachers

Favorite Quote = "Personal experience is the mother of all cognitive map changes." (Page 51)

Chapter Summaries as a Friendly reminder of the contents of the book!  Chapter One:  You're an Influencer (there was no summary provided so I decided to type the final passage which had the subtitle: What This Means to You

There's good news in all of this.  Since our ineffectiveness at influencing others stems from simple inability rather than a character flaw or lack of motivation, the solution lies in continued learning.  We can become powerful influencers.  We don't have to wait for everyone else to miraculously change.  We won't have to constantly seek serenity.

It also means that the changes we need to make won't be too intrusive.  We don't need a lobotomy, a pep talk, or an infusion of tenacity.  Instead, we simply need to expand our self-image by seeing ourselves as influencers; it's the one job that cuts across every domain of our life.  In addition, like any dedicated person, we need to study the works of the influencers who are already good at the job.  As we learn the strategies influencer masters have been implementing for the past five decades, we'll be in far better shape to take on the profound and persistent problems that have been plaguing us for years.

Notice that we have used the word "strategies".  We've chosen the plural because there is no one strategy - no silver bullet- for resolving profound, persistent, and resistant problems.  When it comes to the problems that have us stymied, it takes an entire set of influence methods.  We'll help you create your own set of tools by sharing the strategies used by every influencer we have studied.

These influence strategies, by the way, are value-neutral.  They can be used either to break or to cause a heroin addition.  They can be used either to create or destroy a customer-driven corporate culture.  Naturally, the influencers we studied routinely aimed their strategies as deserving, even noble causes.  But not everyone does or will.  We knowingly share the powerful methods of the world's best influencers as a way of making them both accessible and transparent.  To the degree that people understand these new strategies, their ability to make their own life better grows exponentially.  To the degree that people understand the forces that are already influencing their behavior, they are more empowered to choose their response.

Any one of the influence strategies we explore, combined with what you already know, could be enough to put you on the road to creating lasting change.  Put into play several methods, and your chances for improvement only grow.  Find a way to combine all the methods, and you'll be able to create changes that most of us have only been able to imagine.

So join us as we do our best to answer:  How can I learn to change anything?